Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Joe Furlonger The Balonne Breaks Out Crossing the Divide

The road from Brisbane to Warwick is a
scenic route passing through the Fassifern Valley towards the Darling Downs and
Cunningham’s Gap. We’re headed towards Warwick so Queensland landscape painter,
Joe Furlonger can work on a series of ink drawings using Chinese ricepaper. The
day before, we were in Furlonger’s Samford Valley studio (half an hour
north-west of the Brisbane CBD) discussing framing, farming and other aspects
of the upcoming exhibition of new South-East Queensland landscapes. They will
be shown in Brisbane and Sydney. After a lengthy session addressing the
paintings, we turn towards the end of the studio in which Furlonger works on
his drawings. The traditional Ming dynasty style table, as ever is piled high
with paper and crusted with ink and paint. Gouaches of all sizes, watercolours
with feint but astute pencil markings and the obligatory pile of ricepaper
sheets are in a frenzied state of Furlonger’s own organized chaos. The gouaches,
we decide can be sent down in a box overnight for Ray, my father and Joe’s
primary dealer since 1984 to cast his eye over. The last publication that I
produced for Furlonger (Glasshouse Mountains, 2010) was in the process
of being sent to our printer when my father walked in from the airport with a
series of watercolours in his overnight bag that he claims I had missed during
my visit (but which I contend the artist must have produced subsequently).
These quite literally stopped the presses so that they could be included. As a
postscript, some weeks later one of Furlonger’s key supporters scrawled his
initials on those pages whilst I sat with him in his Melbourne office, indeed
one of them found its way to my own wall at home. So, the Senior Hughes, we
decide will lead the selection of works on paper. However, Joe is unhappy with
the ricepaper works so far. Some of them have ‘been overworked, they’re a bit
lost’. It is apparent that Furlonger has used some of these works, as a means to
make decisions on how to describe the landscape in his new canvases. I am
looking at four or five of the 43 cm square works that are layered with varying
marks. He has drawn the ridgelines of Cunningham’s Gap using a mark that is
about 2 cm thick in dark black ink. Along these are a series of smaller, more
staccato marks, which populate the horizon with trees. Across this is a thin
wash of ink, a shadow cast by Mount Mitchell perhaps, the craggy rise that
looms along the Cunningham highway ten miles west of Aratula. Then with the same
thicker line, an opposing range has formed, almost on top of the first. The
trip we are to undertake is to get ‘another shot at these hill drawings’.

Joe Furlonger, Ink XII, 2012﻿

The next morning, about an hour or so out
of Brisbane and we are winding up the steep incline of the Cunningham Highway,
crossing the Great Dividing Range. Suddenly, from the passenger seat, Furlonger
has spotted a gap in the treeline flanking the two-lane road and we stop where it is relatively safe to do so. Having
gotten out of the car Furlonger has the top offthe thermos for a coffee. This, I soon
realise is only an excuse. ‘I guess this will make a goodmedium for the
ink’. Without much fuss, he has his felt and ricepaper laid out and has mixedsome of the black
coffee with his Chinese ink. As a steady flow of lorries cross the Divide ontheir way to
collect produce in the fertile Darling Downs, the artist works on about 12-14views of a quite
dramatic section of rocky outcrop bathed in early morning sunlight. Thereare patches of very
pale light accentuating the shadows and shape of the trees on the sideof this hill.
After only about twenty minutes, Furlonger has worked hurriedly, we move on,not relishing the
prospect of explaining the necessity of capturing that particular momentin that necessary
spot to the Queensland Highway patrol.Back in the Studio, stapled to the wall is the last
painting whichhas been finished by Furlonger and which has not yet found itsway onto a
stretcher. It is the final work in a series of four paintingsdepicting
Cunningham’s Gap. The painting is composedof a series of green hills, balanced
by a cream or greyishyellow expanse on the right side of the canvas that
runs towardsthe horizon. This work and its three cousins are all punctuated bybuildings, roads
and features, which seemingly rise from the surface.This motif, which recurs in
Furlonger’s paintings, is achievedthrough layering the acrylic-bound pigment in a series
of wet ondry visits. Sometimes there will be more than one canvas receivinghis attention,
depicting similar views or scenes. He visitsthem simultaneously, working one, then
the other. He will continueto work a number of canvases, returning to the first
when ithas sufficiently dried, and so on. I have watched him work in thismethod on
paintings of Moreton Bay, effortlessly achieving thecolours of those mudflats that transform
the bay from a bright blue, to a military green depending on the angle of the
sun.

Joe Furlonger, Crossing the Great Divide, 2012

Joe Furlonger, View from Cunningham's Gap, 2012

This method works less successfully
when Furlonger employs it without a clear idea of drawing in his mind to begin
with. Having witnessed the pace and excitement with which Furlonger has been
applying lines in his drawing for this exhibition, I recognize that these paintings are
enjoying a renewed sense of profound confidence that was certainly evident in
the series of landscapes that were produced depicting the hills around
Guangzhou in the Chinaseries in 2008. One particular work from that
series, Traveling amid Mountains and Streams is an
interesting point of contrast. The works, whilst exploring the same perspective
favoured by Furlonger, of a steep downward angle, also share a dedication to
the line. Furlonger produced a great number of the aforementioned format
ricepaper works whilst on the ground in China. Then returning to the studio to
work many of the paintings. The fascinating point of departure here is the
light. At the time, my catalogue entry for the China show described in somewhat
forrid terms, a ‘confounding but beautiful’ layer in the sky.

Joe Furlonger, Travelling Amid Mountains and Streams, 2008

John McDonald helpfully paraphrased in
his Spectrumcolumn at the time by way of noting that there is smog in
China. A comparison of these two works, perhaps depicting different actual
physical locations but certainly two that share a sense of perspective and
place, reveals Furlonger’s dedication to light. It is a dedication which is
often overlooked, but which is perhaps the most important aspect of his colour
choices when mixing his pigments. The Chinese work is devoid of those sharp
reflections that a piercing sun brings up, these new Australian landscapes are
truthful to the point of fixation with regards light and colour. It is quite
extraordinary that a demonstration of black and sepia drawing brought this to
my attention, and of course they must be read in connection with the hundreds
of gouaches and pastels that Furlonger makes in the lead up to any show. In
regarding the dedication he has to drawing, it is his truthfulness that is most
striking. He can capture the features of an entire valley, of several hundred
acres of land, in a handful of lines. When Furlonger’s landscape is considered
it can be the colours that are the most memorable moments. It is difficult to
forget the generous words of John Olsen, who in 2003, when interviewed for a
documentary on Furlonger broadcast on Channel 9’s Sunday Program, offered “you
transport Joe Furlonger to a place and the place says colour me in, and that’s
what he does”.

Indeed, it is difficult to overstate
the importance of colour in Furlonger’s landscapes, however there is a strength
to this suite of paintings which brings them above the landscapes of the last decade,
beyond even the elemental success of China. This body of works boasts the
strongest power of descriptive drawing, perhaps in his entire oeuvre to date.
It is the accurate sense of location, the sense of directions and of landmarks
that sets them apart. Furlonger is standing in a field with a brush, is looking
out across at his subject and with a sharp eye is capturing it faithfully.

The entire suite was executed in a
period of only about six months. Much of Queensland’s South and most famously
the capital city of Brisbane were devastated by flooding in 2011 and then again
in 2012. The La Ninaweather pattern has transformed a region once affected
by drought (and witnessed in the dry Furlonger paintings which climaxed in
2006) into one which has, in a short period of time, been literally drowned.
The images of Brisbane’s CBD under water made their way around the world and
for the 2011 Wynne prize exhibition, Furlonger executed a particularly strong
image of the day the Brisbane River peaked.

Joe Furlonger, Brisbane River in flood, 2011

The central subject in this exhibition
is his series of canvases depicting the Balonne and Moonie rivers. These works ought be
considered in the context of his Brisbane River in Floodpainting. The
serpentine river-lines produced by Furlonger are in some ways
uncharacteristicallydisciplined. There are some unmistakable poetic
flourishes, such as one river work(not depicted in a plate, but viewed
in oneof the supplementary images of the artistunrolling a work
at the rear of this publication).

Joe Furlonger, The Moonie in Flood, 2012

Joe Furlonger, Channel Country, the Balonne, 2012

Joe Furlonger, View from the Campsite on the Moonie, 2012

Joe Furlonger, The Balonne Breaks Out, 2012

Joe Furlonger, Moonie River with Wheat Storages, 2012

This work is closer to zen calligraphy
than the muddy unfolding Balonne in the cover work of the show. The most interesting
point of comparison in these two works is their respective energy levels. The
Brisbane painting is made up almost as a pastiche. It depicts a city scape at
the bottom of the canvas, the water is a frantically flowing river that is laid
in strips of paint of varying hues of yellowy brown. The three bridges are
drawn from the work he had been doing between 2010 and 2011 of the bridge from
Bribie Island to the mainland and in the distance is a series of hills, which
are more recognizable from the 2010 Glasshouse Mountainsseries. The
great benefit for me as a writer on Furlonger is that I am also his dealer, and
I am made acutely aware of the audience’s reactions. I recall one viewer
passing judgment that they couldn’t recognise what point of the river it was.
They knew Brisbane and couldn’t recognize the bridges, where the high
perspective point was and why there was a view of the mountains. For that
paiting, the sense of place was less important than the sense of panic and
urgency; the feeling of sheer chaos which the painting invokes and which the
whole state of Queensland felt at the time.

The Brisbane flood painting is only a
starting point for the St. George paintings. The series of canvases are defined
by their bold, muddy snakes of riverbend. The river runs through an active
landscape in nearly all of the works. The light distinctly changes from canvas
to canvas. The beautiful purple horizon in The Balonne Breaks Out is so clearly the product of preparatory work with gouaches. Furlonger
explains that the time spent camping by the Moonie was a productive period for
his works on paper. The trip took him to that river west of St. George where he
camped (see Plate 26) and also to the Balonne river. It was the first extended
period of travel to a ‘landscape location’ for Furlonger since at least China
or the time he spent in the Arcadia Valley in 2002/3. That process of being
outdoors for the various phases of the day is important for Furlonger who
famously starts such days with ‘coffee and watercolours’. Not only did the
period of travel to more remote landscapes benefit his attention to the
activities of the light, it allowed for reflection on the unusual. When he
painted the subject of his immediat environs, such as around the Samford
Valley, or previously, when he lived in Palm Beach on the Gold Coast, there was
a tendancy towards a comfortable approach to the physicalities of the place,
conscentrating on more esoteric aspects of shape and rhythm in the works. This
produced some quite beautiful work, such as the harmonious colorist Samford
Valleyseries of 2009 or his rhythmically inclined musings on the Glasshouse
Mountainsof a year later. However Furlonger’s recent travels through not
particularly lyrical landscape, through weatherbeaten ‘working Australia’ is a
return towards of the paintings of 1995 - 2005. The notion of ‘working
Australia’ as a subject is not new to Furlonger, past works have featured the
geometric assignations given by irrigation and property divisions. One classic piece
is a rich ochre base where a bright blue tractor is the immediate focus.
Similar inclinations occur in some of these works, most memorably in Moonie
River with Wheat Storages, where the river bend is flanked by
what first appear to be pools or dams of water. The artist explains these are
in fact the representations of a novel way of storing the excess what produced
by the recent bumper crops underneath blue tarpaulins. They keep them there
‘waiting for the dollar to go down’ and the International market to return. It
is here that one recalls that the landscapes that have been produced are not
the attractive renderings of idyllic spots, but a documentation of the Land as
a concept. Of the Cunningham Gap group, I enquired whether the grey
underpainting on the face of the Mountain represented rocky ground. No, I was
informed, ‘it’s roundup’. Roundup-ready Field is another of
these brutally honest paintings of the herbacide being applied to commercial farming
land. Yet, like the beauty that was evident in the smog-blanketed valleys of
China, there is a similar attraction to these fields, whether because of their
aesthetic finish in Furlonger’s fine powdery surfaces or an air of pride in the
land. Furlonger has more knowledge of the workings of agriculture than any
landscape artist I have worked with. I was too young to have spent much time
with William Robinson when he exhibited with my father, but his own cultivation
of animals certainly made more sense of the Farmyard paintings than many others
who have attempted such things. Lucy Culliton is the other artist who has an
immediate attachment to her land through her animals and daily work. Furlonger
has been involved in rural labour, applied herbacide, worked slashers and has a
fascinating knowledge of the history of farm machinery. It is quite difficult
to imagine John Constable tilling the Fens atop a Chamberlain Champion,
but that is an Australian-made tractor after all, Furlonger informs me.

Joe Furlonger, Round-up Ready Field near Dalby, 2012

The
final important group of works from this series are the figurative ones.
Furlonger has put figures in the landscape before, notably in Broome and Moree.
The livestock paintings here are sometimes drawn from times where he is doing
ink paintings on the side of a road beside a cattle farm (as was the case about
10 kms outside Warwick). Others might be aided by photographs of (Queensland
Senator) Barnaby Joyce behatted and striding bowlegged through Roma. Furlonger
can not escape the figure in this series. So integral to his subject is the
people who impact upon it. So much of the landscape tradition is the depiction
of what nature has given us.

So much of Furlonger’s painting is the
deciphering of what man makes of it.